Tonight, after everyone's asleep, I'm going to sneak down to the house where my grandmother grew up in Nash County, NC, somewhere on a hidden road lined with the giant flatness of tobacco fields (you turn left at the fallen school where she learned to read 'The Song of Hiawatha').
I will slip past the pitbulls and fighting cocks next door. Everything will be as it was when she lived there in the 1930s, with a family of 12 children plus two adopted cousins (their parents had died). I will walk quietly by ghosts of faraway workers from Florida and Arkansas, with rough hands and foreign leers at the little local girls coming home from school. I will hear the catamounts wailing out by the creek. A full moon will guide me on the trail, long forgotten, that grandmother told me about, through the woods, to the Indian graveyard that was ancient and mysterious even when she was a girl. I will stand over it as the stars form archers and planters over my shoulder. I will know what to do despite the fact that the TV didn't tell me. I will water that fucking ground till the mud swamps my shoes and the catamounts come out of their hiding and the satellites will all crash and the drunks will all sit up silent in their beds and shotguns will randomly discharge from their gunracks and the Confederate dead will know why they were wrong and, and, and, and the world will be changed.
